


you, the moon

by dirtybinary



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Baker Bucky, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Smoking, sasshole steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 07:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7881316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Stimulus. The sight of one Bucky Barnes, age seventeen, best friend, roommate, favourite nuisance, coming home after work. Subject’s Response. A swoop of the stomach, like when one pointed one’s bike down that steep hill beside the church and pedalled really fast, but without the inevitable sprained ankles and bloody scrapes.</i>
</p>
<p>Steve likes Bucky. Bucky likes food and cats and girls and maybe, just <i>maybe</i>, Steve.</p>
<p>Steve deals with this very well indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you, the moon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [obsessivereader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsessivereader/gifts).



**i.**  

Steve Rogers was a bit of a fatalist, and would be the first to admit it.

There was, after all, no use being sentimental when life was not. Sentimentality was cursing God for allowing his mother to contract TB from the very patients she had worked to save, or crumpling up on the inside when another birthday passed and the all-important window where a miraculous growth spurt might shoot him up to six foot three—his father’s alleged height—narrowed even more. When life gave you lemons, you sucked it up.

And so he bore the onset of heart-twinging, gut-wrenching love with much the same stoicism as he might the first tickle in his throat at allergy season. It could be said that he did not need to add debilitating affection to his growing list of ailments, but at least Bucky was _nice_ , and could be relied upon to break his heart kindly.

It was really just as well.

 

 

**ii.**

Viewed with a certain degree of clinical detachment, it was the best feeling in the world. (It was also the worst, but that, too, was sentiment talking.)

He dissected it the same way they had once cut up a frog in science class, and he had been the only one at his table who did not throw up. One of two things happened whenever you dissected something: you understood it a little better at its fundamental components, which might help you; or you misplaced a screw or two and then it never worked right again, which seemed to happen to most things of Steve’s anyway, so it wasn’t as if he would be unprepared. He wrote it up in his head like a lab report, just so:

_Stimulus._ The sight of one Bucky Barnes, age seventeen, best friend, roommate, favourite nuisance, coming home after work. _Subject’s Response._ A swoop of the stomach, like when one pointed one’s bike down that steep hill beside the church and pedalled really fast, but without the inevitable sprained ankles and bloody scrapes. A clench of the heart. Not the bad sort that led to a trip to the hospital, just a quick gentle squeeze. Warmth flooded to the face, and to other places. Subject tended to forget what he was saying, or doing, or thinking.

When it came down to it, subject did not really mind.

_Further Observations._ Bucky shedding his shirt and suspenders—dropping them meticulously in the laundry basket, of course, because Bucky put everything away in its proper place when he was done with it. The skin beneath glistening with a fine sheen of sweat, and his hair—perfectly pomaded this morning—falling damply over his forehead, sweat-limp from a long day at the ovens. The large paper carton under his arm, giving off all manner of mouth-watering smells; the big smile on his face. The best thing about the job at the baker’s, in Bucky’s opinion, was how he could take home leftovers at the end of the day, so they never really had to go hungry. 

The other best thing, in Steve’s opinion, was how Bucky’s fingers always smelled of pastries no matter how many times he washed—flour and sugar and oil and grease, the occasional cut of bacon, even a slice of fresh fruit. Smells of home, of plump dinners together, listening to the latest radio play while they squabbled over the last morsel of butterscotch pie and their knees knocked under the table. Life and warmth and fullness, and Bucky smiling at him like he was now, and saying, “Hey, Stevie.”

Steve smiled back, because he could, because it was easy to smile at Bucky, because—against all the odds of the genetic lottery—he was alive and young and happy, and he did not have to be alone. “Hello, Buck.”

 

 

**iii.**

And then, at eighteen: lying on the fire escape with Bucky, trading one of his asthma cigarettes back and forth while they tried to count stars through the smog. Their shoulders were touching, their legs stretched out side by side in front of them. Bucky’s were longer, of course. Steve pulled his knees up so the difference would not be so obvious (he had long since given up on that mythical growth spurt), and then put them down again. He was at home, alone with Bucky under the hazy stars, and his heart was doing a funny thing—maybe because of Bucky’s proximity, or the atropine in the cigarette, or maybe he was finally about to keel over and bite it at last—and he was damned well _allowed_ to be short tonight. Sometimes when he was with Bucky, he attained a state of contentment so profound it was like not having a body at all; like being pure spirit at the Final Judgement, free from hunger and cold and aches and allergies, free to roam like the wind wherever his heart pleased. To the Grand Canyon, to the beaches of the Bahamas, to the boulangeries of Paris and the cliffs of Santorini—

Then Bucky shifted against him to get comfortable, thigh bumping companionably against Steve’s, and Steve decided that, hell, he _did_ have a body after all. 

And that was okay too. He stretched out his legs, bumping Bucky’s ankle with the scuffed toe of his shoe, dipping his head so it came to rest—almost—on Bucky’s shoulder, feeling very small, very coy, and very pleased with himself. He had contrived to be sitting here in this very time and place, with none other than James Buchanan Barnes, who had hair as soft as a fawn’s and starched all his shirts and knew most of _The War of the Worlds_ by heart, who could be stepping out with any nice girl he chose but was here, now, next to Steve at two in the morning when a good boy would be in bed, smoking an asthma cigarette even though he did not have asthma. The Depression had finally killed the bakery, so Bucky no longer had to get up at four in the morning for work, and Steve—well, Steve drew pinups for a dollar each and he could do that wherever, whenever. They had all night.

(The downside was that they had maybe seventy-five cents to their name after rent and groceries—a fact that ought probably have worried Steve, but he was eighteen and in love or at least a vaguely altered state of consciousness, and all these things conspired to give him a certain sense of invincibility. Let the world come; he would meet it with Bucky at his side.)

“Hello, Stevie,” said Bucky, and when Steve smiled up at him he smiled back, slow and soft and gentle as the muggy sky. “I can hear you thinking.”

Steve was thinking—he was always thinking—that Bucky had an arm flung loosely around his waist, and now would be an excellent time for the hand belonging to that arm to make its way up or maybe down, in search of more interesting climes. Bucky, always quick to hug or play-fight where Steve was concerned, had become somewhat less expansive over the past year, a judiciousness that boded well because it suggested he knew exactly what he would like to do with his hands and was trying not to think about it. The thing about Bucky was that he was a gentleman—he always got the girls home by eleven, and never touched them except when he offered his arm on the dance floor, and his hands, like vampires, had to be invited over the threshold.

Steve considered for a moment how he might best accomplish this. It was dark, the street below deserted enough that anything could be dared. He said, “I’m thinking I want to try something.”

He drew a long breath from the cigarette and motioned to Bucky to lean down. Bucky did so, still smiling, not asking any questions—he could be so goddamned trusting sometimes—and Steve stretched up to meet him. Slowly, so Bucky had time to pull back if he wanted to, Steve brought his smoke-filled mouth to his.

He blew the smoke between Bucky’s lips, or tried to; and Bucky breathed in, or tried to; and they fell together laughing, lips, teeth, tongues, noses, everything. It was more a collision than a kiss, messy and inevitable as a car crash. Bucky said, “ _Jesus Christ_ ,” with a sort of reverence that made it more a prayer than a blasphemy, and Steve grinned, because Bucky’s hands had made it properly around his waist and were listing hopefully in the exact directions he had projected. All boded well.

For never having done this before, he was really good at it. A natural tactician, or something. He really ought to join the army.

 

 

**iv.**

After all that, Steve was growing concerned that he’d just had a windfall of beginner’s luck, and that the rest of this—the part that involved going out to fancy restaurants and making conversation that did not revolve around enemy movements or arm puns—would be harder to pull off. (He also had to admit that the seventy-year break they’d had was rather hampering his momentum.)

As usual, there was nothing for it but to square his jaw and roll with the punches. At age ninety-six, he was still a fatalist. 

It couldn’t be too bad, anyway. He’d gone on his fair share of dates, some of which had been all right, others total disasters. He knew what he liked and what other people did. More importantly, he knew how to engineer a quick escape if things went unsalvageably wrong (there was always the old _Hydra’s attacking I have to go right this moment_ trick, which in all fairness he had only ever used once, and it had been true then). And Bucky—Bucky was doing really well, wasn’t he? Or at least, well enough that being together felt more like navigating a dance floor than a minefield, especially since his sense of black humour had resurfaced in full force. “Don’t worry if you fuck it up, Stevie,” he’d said this morning, his hands covered in dough and flour, a streak of icing on his nose. “I won’t remember anyway.”

These days Bucky’s memory lapses were confined to such matters as buying more ice cream when he inevitably finished the last of it, or not using Sam’s razor, wearing his clothes, or putting fridge magnets on Redwing, and therefore reeked of convenient selectivity. Steve managed to keep a straight face, and said, “What if _you_ fuck it up?”

The old smile was winging the tips of Bucky’s mouth. “Who’s gonna believe you if you tell?”

So Steve had no choice but to plan out the date with the care of, say, a fugitive agent drawing up an assault on a massive underground terrorist organisation that happened to have infiltrated his workplace. It went like this:

_Dinner._ A French café not far from their place. Bucky liked pastries and sweet things, and was sure to devour madeleines, macarons and pain au chocolat by the platter. _Walk home._ The route back from the café would take them past the animal shelter they visited sometimes—a happy coincidence, because the only thing Bucky adored more than cupcakes was cats. _Worst-case scenario._ Spend the rest of the evening at the shelter, where Bucky could cover himself in kittens and Steve could play fetch with that one golden retriever that seemed to like him, and they wouldn’t need to say a word to each other all night. _Best-case scenario._ Go home. Steve had a bottle of champagne waiting in reserve at the back of their kitchen cupboard, and Bucky always had éclairs or cookies or lemon meringue squirreled away somewhere. They could have supper, and maybe watch reruns of Dog Cops while they made out on the couch. Or something.

He had it all thought out. He even had contingencies in case Bucky had a meltdown or the shelter was closed or the villain of the week interrupted their dinner. He _was_ supposed to be the world’s greatest living strategist.

“You gonna get dressed or what?” asked Bucky, popping his head into the studio. The icing on his nose was gone, replaced by a smear of chocolate on his lower lip. He must have been sampling the goods. He was also, it appeared, taking this date as seriously as any courtship ritual from the early 1900s: he was in a button-up shirt and his favourite leather jacket, and a pair of dress slacks so obscenely tight he must have stolen them from Sam. He had shaved and combed his hair and put on cologne, and there was even the faintest hint of mascara in his lashes. “Or you gonna wear _that_?”

Having spent the afternoon painting a bird mural on their living room wall, Steve was still in boxer shorts and a white tank top splotched here and there with Muted Cerulean no. 2. There was probably a paintbrush stuck behind his ear to complete the look. He reached up, not without some self-consciousness. Yup. There it was. Great.

A new idea came to him. “Speak for yourself,” he said, striving to hit a note of blithe carelessness. One ought never look too eager on a first date. “You’ve got”—he made vague hand circles, no, big, confident, _suave_ circles—“on your…”

Bucky touched his lip, but made no move to wipe the chocolate away. He canted his head to the side, looking expectant. “Okay?” 

“Here,” said Steve, getting up to pad across the room to him. Smooth, silent, stealth-mode steps. This was not at all part of his plan, but a good strategist was never afraid to improvise. “Let me.”

 

 

**v.**

In the end they did not go to the café, or pet any cats at the shelter, or indeed leave the house at all, but as far as Steve was concerned the date was an absolute success. 

He was _really_ good at this.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Road Music by Richard Siken.
> 
> [dirtybinary](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) on tumblr


End file.
